Peter,
Ah, I remember very well!
It is about twenty years ago, isn't it?
An interesting approach.
You loved WordPerfect too, as one can see.
Did you ever work with Ventura Publisher?
In this point Ventura seems to bee related with WordPerfect.
Or do you know CCS Textline?
How fine it would be to make the borders of formating styles visible e.g. in text mode.
This would help to find overrides and the extension of overrides, too.
Here is my script-approach (in CS2) to do the job (there might be some code of yours inside the script):